“It’s a good market for infrastructure funds and for private equity companies who may want to get into the utility space,” said Yurkevicz, a utilities-industry consultant. “There are a lot of opportunities out there in the marketplace, even for the largest utilities who want to grow their business.”

More than 350 coal-fired generators, or about 6% of the U.S.’s power generating capacity, are “ripe for retirement,” the Union of Concerned Citizens said in a report released Tuesday.

Such plants, mostly in the South and the Midwest, are no longer economically competitive and should be slated for closure, the group said.

“Growing competition from cheaper, cleaner alternatives — including natural gas and renewable energy sources such as wind and solar — is making it harder for these generators to produce energy economically,” the report said.

New York City’s main utility on Thursday said it would likely take more than another week to restore service to the vast majority of its customers who lost power because of Hurricane Sandy. No one seemed to notice, even though electricity is key to getting gasoline supplies to where they need to be.

Reuters

Waiting for gasoline in NY.

The utility, also known as Con Edison – a unit of Consolidated Edison Inc. ED*, said about 900,000 customers in New York City and Westchester County lost power due to the super storm, and it expects to restore service to vast majority of those by the weekend of Nov. 10 and 11. The remaining customer restorations could take another week or more, it said.

“Power and flooding are the clear problems for restarting refineries, terminals, gas stations and pipelines,” said John Felmy, chief economist of the American Petroleum Institute. “The industry is working hard to restart, but without grid power, we must rely on generators.”

Water shortages could be China’s own version of the perfect storm, potentially blowing a hole in carefully laid plans of an incoming generation of leaders.

Reuters

Targets for moderately fast economic development, seen as crucial for the Communist Party to maintain its grip on power, no longer seem so easy to achieve as China is running shy of the water needed to leverage up the electrical-power generation it requires to meet those targets.

Switching the energy mix between nuclear, hydro-power, coal or even the exploitation of promising shale-gas deposits, doesn’t really add up because of a reliance on a shrinking water supply.

HSBC highlighted China’s economic Achilles’ heel in a recent report looking at the relationship between the growing electrical-power needs of industry and strained water resources.

In fact, ambitious plans to expand power capacity, as currently sketched out, might be unachievable owing to what HSBC says are “real water constraints.”

Take, for example, coal-fired power plants, which form the front line of China’s short-term plans to boost electrical output. By 2020, plans are to bring an additional 453 gigawatts of output online — equivalent to adding Russia’s annual electricity output from all sources — on top of the current capacity of about 630 GW.

The utility warned customers Monday “to prepare for the possibility of lengthy outages — perhaps seven days or more — due to the enormity of Hurricane Sandy. ” It added that “It may take until Wednesday until a full assessment of the storm’s damage can be made and the utility can more accurately predict when full restoration can be made.”

Houston-based Clean Line Energy Partners thinks big. The three-year-old energy infrastructure developer plans to gather permits and rights-of-way for new multi-billion-dollar transmission lines to carry electricity from the U.S.’s vast wind power resources in the middle of the Lower 48 to the population centers on the coasts. The lines would cost up to $8 billion to build, under their latest estimate. It’s a mammoth undertaking, with Clean Line’s staff of about 40 people focused on engineering, public hearings, and reams of paperwork to satisfy regulatory requirements from local municipalities to the U.S.’s Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. One way Clean Line’s proposal differs from other transmission methods is in its use of direct current transmission instead of alternating current. Nearly all of the big power lines in the U.S. operate on alternating current, or AC, a method that won a big fight more than 100 years ago between AC booster Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison, a proponent of DC.

While triple-digit temperatures are afflicting much of the U.S. this week including an expected spike in Washington, D.C., the heat wave won’t dry up power supplies, analysts said Thursday. That’s partly because overall electricity demand has yet to fully recover from the recession, with 2009 witnessing the largest drop in demand in 60 years, according [...]

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